Facebook is one of the best sites to meet people and re-establish old relationships with friends from school or university but, as often happens, it is used lightly, without the slightest attention to what we write or share.
It so happens that, after a few years, we regret what we wrote or shared at the time, or we want to hide our past activity that is not convenient. In order to fix the mistakes of the past, in this guide we will show you how to hide messages on your Facebook profile, so that our future messages can only be read by some trusted friends and we will also show you how to archive or remove tags from old messages, so that you can put them back tidy our diary without fearing too much for privacy.
READ ALSO: Hide Facebook profile and make yourself invisible
Set up message privacy
To set the privacy of a post on Facebook before sharing it, click on the Privacy button at the bottom, in the input field, and choose who will be able to see the message sent.
By choosing Everyone, the message will be public and can also be seen by users who are not on our friends list and by people not yet registered on Facebook. If we want to filter the people who can see the messages, we select Friends to show the messages only to the friends added to the account, otherwise we click on Friends except to exclude some friends from viewing the message.
By clicking on the Other button, we will unlock new privacy options, useful for further filtering the people who can (or not) view the content: by choosing Specific friends, the message will be visible only by the selected friends; selecting Only me the message will be visible only from our profile (the message will actually be private); selecting Group of friends we will be able to send the message only to the friends inserted in a group (as we will see below); by clicking on Show all, we can select the closest friends (the ones we are most often in contact with) or select a group, a place we attended (university, school etc.) or a place where we have been (our city of birth, our current city of residence etc.).
The buttons that we have shown you are slightly different if we want to share the message as History, instead of simple post; once the content of the story has been prepared, select the Your story button below, then click the Privacy button on the side.
In this window we can choose All to display the history to all Facebook and Messenger users, select Friends and contacts to display the history only to Facebook friends and Messenger contacts or if to show the history only to friends on Facebook ( by selecting the Friends button).
If we want the message privacy setting to be ready when we write a message (without having to tinker with the specific button every time), let's go to the arrowhead menu at the top right, select the Settings menu then do click on the Privacy menu.
We change the setting Who can see your future posts "> guide to Facebook privacy settings, it is perhaps the most tedious but also most important operation to have a protected and usable account without worries. Lists can be easily created by clicking on Friends list from the list on the left (it could be hidden: display it by pressing on Other ) and selecting the Create a list button.
A window will open where we will only have to choose the friends to include in it. The lists can then be used to decide who can see and what of themselves.
In addition to personal lists, Facebook also offers ready-made lists of friends, based on our interests and the places where we lived (cities, schools, universities, etc.).
Once we have created our list of friends, we can use it in the Privacy menu before sending a message on the bulletin board, so as to hide what we share with a specific person or friends not on the list.
Archive old messages and remove tags
To prevent someone from seeing our old messages on Facebook or if we want to hide a message published some time ago, we can edit all the old posts by adding the desired level of privacy.Let's go back to the arrowhead menu at the top right, click on the Settings menu then select the Privacy menu. From here we press on the item Limit past posts and then on the button of the same name.
In this way, all old messages that had privacy set to All or Friends of friends, will be changed instantly, obtaining Friends as a privacy level (only our friends will be able to see the old messages).
If instead we wanted to change the presence of the tags in the photos, let's go to the Diary nenu and add the tag, then modify the items. You want to check the posts where they tag you before the post is displayed on your diary ">
If, on the other hand, we wanted to remove a single tag from a photo or message, simply display the latter, right click on the three dots at the top right of the content and use the Remove tag item .
As a last tip to increase Facebook's privacy, we will show you how to manage multiple messages at the same time, so you can choose whether to archive them (ie make them visible only to us) or change the privacy of the tags.
Click on our profile picture, top left (where our name and surname is also present); once we open our personal page, we click the Manage posts button.
After pressing on this button, we select all the messages that we have published or in which we have been tagged (up to a maximum of 50), click on Next at the bottom and select what to do:
- Hide posts: useful for archiving messages (which will become visible only to us);
- Remove tags: allows you to remove our tag from the photo;
- Delete the post: allows you to permanently delete the message from Facebook, without the possibility of recovery (only if the message was written by us).
Conclusions
Although it often speaks of Facebook as one of the sites that respects the user's privacy less (and in many ways it is), the site has evolved so much as to offer full control over the privacy of messages and content shared on social networks, so that you don't have to fear anything.If we want to create a secret chat with a Facebook contact, we invite you to read our guide on How to use secret chat in Facebook Messenger . If, on the other hand, we are afraid of catching viruses or seeing our personal information stolen on Facebook, I recommend you read our study on how to avoid viruses on Facebook and applications that steal personal data.
